Odds & Ends

Not much happening on this day after Christmas but I found a few things for you to consider.

It has been a very quiet, rangebound trade since the conclusion of the last raid back on Thursday. The HFTs are in charge and they are alternately jamming price slightly higher and lower as they attempt to fatten some profits before year-end. The result is 3 days of market boredom with silver in a 50¢ range and seemingly going nowhere. Gold is stuck, too, but at least shows some signs of life. It double-bottomed near $1640 late last week and has since recovered quite nicely. IF it can get some traction here and move UP through $1680 and then $1690, it will actually enter 2013 with a positive-looking chart. Let's just see what the rest of this week holds.

The only market that held any excitement today was crude. Recall that we've been watching crude in a range from $85-90 since mid-October. Today, it finally broke higher and through $90, with the Feb13 closing at $91.17. Now the question is: Can it hold the breakout tomorrow and Friday or will it simply fall back down under $90? IF it can hold, it will set up an early 2013 test of the $95 level and IF it gets above there, a return trip to $100 awaits. Two things:

$100 crude would definitely be supportive of higher metals prices.

The situation in the MENA has been "hot" for some time now with various headlines going and coming. However, crude has remained below $90. Suddenly, today, it's $91. Hmmmm....

Finally, if you're like me you're probably looking for something to do, so, below is a YouTube link to a documentary. This show was mentioned in a ZH thread last week and I took the time to watch it. It's a fascinating story about the "Flash Crash" of May 2010. It's relevant here simply because the focus is High Frequency Trading and, as you know, those damn WOPRs have been wreaking havoc in the metals pits for some time now. Here are some background links to pique your interest:

They had an exhibit of the works of multiple dutch painters at the Peabody Essex Museum north of Boston and some of the stuff just took you head off. There were a couple Rembrandts, some of his contemporaries, some predecessors and some who followed him. The detail of some paintings was just amazing. More than once I ended up standing in a semi-circle of people all staring slack jawed at a painting because you just couldn't believe how detailed it was. There was one by a painter of whom I'd never heard, Gerritt Dou (hope I spelled that right). There was a white dog in the foreground of the painting of a sort of domestic scene and it looked like there was a brush stroke for every freaking hair on the damn dog. If I'm ever in surgery, I want the doctor to have hands as steady as Gerritt Dou must've had to paint that freaking dog and the rest of that scene.

My personal favorite is the english painter J.M.W. Turner and especially Dido Builds Carthage but those dutch masters deserve one's respect even if it's not quite someone's particular taste.

Sounds like you will have serious work to do either way. One job will be adjusting the paradigms and priorities of your 'still nesting' kids. This may require an attitude adjustment on their part... inspired by you. In addition to that, if you buy the apartment building, you'll also add an unknown amount/scope/cost of work being the investor, landlord, bookkeeper, handyman, contractor for a rental building filled with college students.

Even if this is an Ivy and not prone to deflate as much with the coming college bubble pop, go for the place of safety, away from the campus. With a change in attitude, happiness will be wherever you are. "Happiness" may need to be clarified and appreciated by the kids, the way you described the situation.

A few weeks prepping a garden plot in exchange for room and board might just be a needed attitude adjustment... or the motivation to find work and a place of their own.

about distinguishing what type of college it is near.........but you know what?...it may not even matter if it's Ivy League or not.......in fact, the Ivy schools have the highest price tag.......they may fall prey as quickly or even more so to the coming college loan bubble collapse.

I was fortunate enough to go to a private high school.....they turn out dozens and dozens of Ivy scholarship kids every year... (no, i'm not one of them!...as if you couldn't tell) I was attending an open house at my former high school with my son, who wants to attend high school there as well. While waiting to speak to someone, i engaged a student there who was volunteering......i asked him what his major was going to be and where he was going to go to college (since he was a senior).....he told me he was an advanced mathematics kid....and that he was going to attend 2 yrs at a local community college.....i was shocked.....i said "really?" and he said "yeah.....then i'm going to Columbia.....i can't afford 4 yrs of Columbia....i'm going to transfer in"......

That conversation right there made me aware that even the brightest of the bright are price shopping college........and figuring out ways to get that Ivy League degree without paying full sticker price...... and you and I both know that i didn't stumble upon an isolated incident.

So it seems to me it doesn't matter what college campus it is.........it is going to be vulnerable to the macro-economic state that the country finds itself in...... broke is broke. I like Mr. Fix's idea.....but then again, we seem to have a lot in common.....and that could include bad investment advice!

and Germany government raids biggest private bank, Deutschebank. And what about those tungsten bars?

Video unavailable

. Why would the German government raid its biggest private bank? Surely not for some silly tax fraud involving the even sillier elite-sponsored carbon tax idea! Perhaps this has something to do with it:

If true, thus would mean Deutschebank is in on whatever scheme seems to be involving prime banks, central banks, and all the re-hypothecated gold, and by implication, the highly obfuscated figures for the actual amount of gold in existence in the world. Germany, as most readers of this website already know, is one of those nations that is giving clear signals that it is very suspicious of the structure of the Western financial world, by calling for audits and in some circles the repatriation of its gold reserves. And as readers of this website also know, it appears that, for whatever reason, the center of this storm is the privately owned American central bank, the Federal Reserve. We’ve seen story after story in the past few years of the complete criminality of the Western banksters, primary in the city of London and on Wall Street, and stories of wholesale theft and fraud, so why not believe that the banksters of the Federal Reserve haven’t been in on the fraud and theft of a whole lot of gold? Well, maybe, maybe not, but in any case, the Germans are suspicious, and one can hardly blame them.

Then, as if to reassure at least the “Anglo” component of this vastly corrupt Anglo-American financial oligarchy, one old lady recently paid a visit to another old lady. In the latter case, the old lady in question was the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in London, the Bank of England, and the other old Lady was H.M. Elizabeth II of various and sundry scattered palaces, who was given a tour of the bank’s bullion vaults, with plenty of pictures being taken to make sure that everyone knew and could see vast amounts of nice shiny gold bars all stacked in tidy English rows on shelves:

Well, one can hardly blame the Queen of that country for being a little ticked off over the fact that its financial experts didn’t see the crash coming. What relatively sane monarch wouldn’t be concerned for the welfare of his or her subjects? What bothers me with the Daily Mail article are all those picture of the Queen with all that nice shiny gold…

So No nukes going to US from the UK. No Nukes going from the UK to the US and No Nukes going to Canada from the UK and No Nukes going to Canada from the US. Finally No Canadians going to UK or US. An international incident has been avoided.

I didn't get an Ivy League degree either. But I worked with tons of ivy league MBA's that started at ground level and after a few years they either plateau in their salary, or looked for a job as a consultant or independent business owner trying to make more money from the company they left because they weren't management material in their previous company. If I could time travel, I'd take all the money I spent on college and invested in a business.

Columbia tuition with undergrad, I'm thinking 200-300 grand.

M.B.A.

0 to 21

$29,192

M.B.A. Global Immersions

$1,800 per course

21.5 to 23

$37,940

$1,950

$430 Instructional Materials Fee for M.B.A. students$1,350 Program Fee for M.B.A. students, 1st term only

They might make 100 to 150 grand as a marketing manager 1st couple of years.

Versus the University of......

Most of the Dunkin Donuts in NYC are owned by Bangladeshi Immigrants who didn't go to college in this country if at all. Franchise costs at a minimum are at least 300 grand, more if you have to build. In NYC, you don't build. You just invest in infrastructure for an existing store. Those Bangladeshi's are now independently wealthy, owning multiple stores and they work for no one. If the owners so desire, they could go back to school and take an accounting class. Universities don't teach entrepreneurial skills. This is just me speaking. If I had to do it all over again, I'd invest directly into a business.

Look I don't want this to cause an international incident.It's was just you have so much open space in America and Canada. But I have a solution, we could send him here.Where he can be contained by the miltary.

Maybe he will be able to disarm Iran by himself.Bollocks Listed the improvements to the nation's well being. You must understand there no way we can go back now.

It feels like things are building up,bit by bit.I feel uneasy.Probably too much food.

THE TELEGRAPH

US lambasts China for breaches of trade rules

Washington has issued a blistering attack on China for persistent breaches of world trade rules and abuse of industrial secrets, accusing Beijing of failing to abide by treaty obligations.

China is still flouting World Trade Organisation rules 11 years after it first joined, misusing the complaints machinery for tit-for-tat retaliation, said US Trade Repesentative Ron Kirk.

"China's trade policies and practices in several specific areas cause particular concern for the United States," said Mr Kirk in his year-end report to Congress.

"China's regulatory authorities at times seem to pursue anti-dumping and countervailing duty investigations and impose duties for the purpose of striking back at trading partners that have exercised their WTO rights in a way that displeases China," said the report.

'End the era of Ponzi finance' mainstream Sunday Newspaper.

The Telegraph

Chilling economic report strikes fear into CEOs

Over an early-morning coffee with the chief executive of a FTSE 100 business last week, talk turned to the outlook for 2013. Where I had expected some guarded optimism, instead I heard a chilling analysis.

The CEO said he had been reading a new paper from Boston Consulting Group headed “Ending the era of Ponzi finance”. The lessons he had taken from it were miserable.

The West was not going to find its way to the right economic path with a little tweaking at the edges, the CEO said. What is needed is a wholesale overhaul of the economic system to tackle record levels of public and private debt. Was anyone brave enough to do it, he wondered aloud.

I asked him to send me the report. He did.

The BCG study by Daniel Stelter which is doing the rounds of corporate C-suites does not pull its punches. In fact, its punches are really just a softening-up exercise for a barrage of kicks and painful blows aimed at anyone who thinks that kicking the can down the road is a suitable substitute for radical action.

At the heart of the analysis is the issue of debt. A report by the Bank of International Settlements, the study notes, found that the combined debts of the public and private sector in the 18 core members of the OECD rose from 160pc of GDP in 1980 to 321pc in 2010.

Streible tells Bloomberg Television why he thinks silver will be the number one commodity pick for 2013. Washington's Blog says big bullion banks borrow gold from central banks, and then rehypothecate it numerous times. Silver Doctors: Drive the price down, raise margins, rinse and repeat. Russia to Cypress' loan extension request: Nyet! DS says fiscal cliff was a planned event and nothing will be done to ameliorate it. All this and more on...

"Gold is the kind of investment that you buy and keep aside and it's always there for a particular ... or very real situation ... a crisis, even wartime, you know during those periods if you have a bar of gold it's something that is absolutely valuable ... wherever in the world"

Something's afoot. Why are the MSM suddenly putting these reports out? This is very unusual. If one report appears, so what. But so many in such a short period of time, saying the things that are being said?

Well, I think something is up. I really do. This is very unusual coming from the MSM.

That has me wondering too. Is it a trap? Get the masses to jump into gold, then crash the price is what I'm thinking. I need to think hard as I have some fiatscos that need to turn into something real. I'm not keen to buy then have the bottom fallout. I'd like to get more real stuff for the fake stuff. Might it be better to wait?????

1. Gold did not fall on its own gravity. It was forced lower.
2. That take down had a distinct pattern outlined by CIGA Richard’s note. It was high velocity, high volume offering at a market period of illiquidity. The form is a straight line down in a very short period of time.
3. This pattern is the hallmark of those seeking a lower price for gold.
4. The limit to this strategy exists in two things. The first is when the cash market fails to fully respond to the paper takedown. The second will be apparent in the form of a takedown that will present themselves. Those takedowns are short on lower volume. Seeking profits, shorts that are only hangers on will seek to duplicate the strength of the $1800 – $1775 – $1750 take down but run into cash market demand. This will be the price that pleases Asian demand promised to us from China. The paper market will not be able depress the cash market penny to penny.
5. The first signs are definitively in that the long war conducted by the US and GB against the euro has been lost. The euro is in a new birthing process, against all odds, as rising into the category of reserve demand.
6. Euroland and all the BRICs have been buyers of gold for reasons not motivated by emotion, but based on events yet to occur.
7. I have assured you that gold is migrating back into the monetary system, not as convertible, but rather as an alarm by price function. The price will be determined in the cash market as a product of speculation concerning a global M3.
8. Since construction in monetary science requires destruction, first the volatility of gold is going to be significantly more violent than even I anticipated.
9. The magnets at $2111 and floating around $4000 may simply be grade one of an educational system.
10. I have seen this type of take down before.
11. It was just prior to the major move in gold in the 70s wherein gold rose the most over the shortest period of time.
12. The operation of gold’s price is not for a short to profits as its market character speaks of deep pockets only governments can have. I suspect that battle for the survival of the euro might soon be reversed into the battle for dollar survival.Euroland,Russia andAsia from central banks to connected financial entities have been buyers of gold. The tables have shifted. The signs of the new triumvirate being on the offensive sits right in front of us.

This is the transition that I believe is at hand. This operation is from some mega interest not seeking to profit on a short, but to obtain the most gold possible for this market event which will play into 2015 to 2017.

Conclusion:

There is not top in gold. The gold price is going much higher than I originally anticipated. The long standing currency war has shifted now putting the dollar in harms way. Gold and those very special gold situations are going much higher. Borrowed money cannot be used without taking risk beyond reason.

Stay the course because what has so far occurred is only the appetizer.

i agree........it makes me nervous. Hell, i dont even like the GoldMoney commercials.... simply because we dont know if it's a trap.......or are they finally trying to get the public involved in the speculation phase....simply to run the value of gold through the ceiling? Maybe they want to encourage citizen investment in gold ahead of a law to confiscate gold? Make us pay for it....then take it? I haven't a clue.....but i can tell you this, i don't trust a damn thing they show me...... they could show me a blue sky.....and that alone would convince me it's red.

Thanks for getting round to posting Nights in White Satin as requested in an earlier post. Days of Future past remains one of my favourite albums afater all these years. It is the original, and IMHO still the best, "Concept" album.

"Red is grey and Yellow White,

But WE decide which is right.

And which IS an illusion."

Makes me think of the PM markets in these days of Central Planning. Nothing makes sense but the fundamentals remain unchanged.

RTE here in Ireland ran a gold special on their prime time news program. It was a look at gold as an investment, definitely leaning to the positive IMHO. This was a few weeks ago. Will see if I can find a link.

Indeed, is it a trap? Then crash the prices. The majority lose all belief in pm's. Fiat stays strong for yet another round.

Maybe. Maybe. But then there's the possibility that the spot price and the retail price will separate considerably. There's a strong chance that will happen, I do believe.

Whatever happens, I won't be selling my stack because I know this is all a game. If they are looking to crash the fiat price and destroy confidence they may win for a little bit longer, but not in the long run. It's a game they're playing to keep the theft-machine, fiat currency, alive as long as possible.

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